奥巴马获诺贝尔和平奖 US President Barack Obama on Friday won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for what the Nobel Foundation called “his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples”.
Awarding the SKr10m ($1.4m) prize, the Nobel committee said: “Only very rarely has a person to the same extent as Obama captured the world’s attention and given its people hope for a better future. His diplomacy is founded in the concept that those who are to lead the world must do so on the basis of values and attitudes that are shared by the majority of the world’s population.”
The Nobel committee awarded the prize to Mr Obama less than nine months into his presidency. There were a record 205 nominations for this year’s prize. Morgan Tsvangirai, Zimbabwe’s prime minister, was among the favourites to win.
While Mr Obama’s presidency has thus far been marked by a firm rejection of the interventionism of the Bush years, many foreign policy experts argue that it is too soon to judge whether it would bring a more secure world.
He has certainly set out an ambitious international agenda, with outreach to the Muslim world, Russia and Iran. He has also made the goal of nuclear non-proliferation a central theme of his presidency.
But Mr Obama has yet to score any breakthrough on the Middle East peace process or on halting Iran’s nuclear programme.
He also faces difficult choices on the conduct of the war in Afghanistan. The award of the peace prize may yet be followed by a decision to send thousands more US troops to Afghanistan.
Mr Obama is the third senior US Democrat to win the prize this decade. Former US vice-president Al Gore won in 2007 along with the United Nations climate panel, and Jimmy Carter won in 2002.
